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Those of you outside of the UK may not have noticed, but if you live in the UK you cannot have failed to notice the fact that election fever has gripped the media (maybe not the entire country yet, just the media) who won’t let us forget that there is a General Election on the 6th May.

As well as borrowing the idea of a leadership debate from the USA, we also seem to have acquired an interest in the ancestry of the three main candidates. I remember seeing many mentions of the ancestry of Barack Obama during his campaign and election. His family even has it’s own page on Wikipedia.

Attention has now turned to the ancestors of Gordon Brown, David Cameron and Nick Clegg. I mentioned yesterday that there was an article about the ancestors of the three candidates in the first edition of the new Your Family History magazine.

The May 2010 edition of Family History Monthly has an article on the ancestry of David Cameron, and I am sure I have seen a similar treatment of Gordon Brown’s ancestors in another magazine, but don’t remember seeing Nick Clegg receiving the same treatment, after all no-one had heard of him until last week!

Findmypast.co.uk have researched the ancestors of the three leaders (illustrated with some census images), highlighting some of the similarities and pointing out some of the interesting characters in their family trees.

One of these characters was Baroness Moura Budberg (Nick Clegg’s 2x great aunt) who also gets a mention on the Time Archive Blog today, with a wonderful quote from her obituary, "she could drink any sailor under the table without batting an eyelid."